Advances in processor, networking and other related technologies have led to increased networked computing, and abundant availability of content on private and public networks. Users may access the available content from computing devices remote from the content storage and interact with the content using their local computing device. A particularly relevant example is medical imaging, in which radiologists and other physicians may access and manipulate medical images as part of diagnostic interpretation. However, today, managing, viewing, manipulating, sharing and annotating images often requires specialized software. Even where such managing, viewing, manipulating, sharing and annotating of images may currently be performed over a general purpose viewing agent, such as a web browser, the general purpose viewing agent often requires usage and/or installation of special add-on or plug-in software components to the web browser, such as Applets or ActiveX technology. In this regard, existing web-based imaging systems may be limited in their imaging functionality, and/or may not be “true thin client” as they require software to be installed and maintained on every computer, which incurs high support and maintenance costs. With an ActiveX-based system, accessing an image may involve installation of software that requires administrative privileges and changing default browser security settings. Java Applet-based systems may suffer performance limitations and require pre-installation of the Java runtime environment, which may be a difficult and laborious process.
In many environments where medical images are viewed, it is often not convenient to load Applets or ActiveX components that are not already installed in the browser due to security constraints, performance issues, and/or managed deployment constraints. In particular, the “friction” of installing and maintaining these applications makes them less than ideal in a medical context for remote consultation or communicating findings with referring physicians at third party institutions. Some prior attempts have been made to offer a thin client through the use of animated Graphic Interchange Format (GIF) images, however animated GIFs cannot be manipulated manually and accordingly are not suitable for general purpose diagnostics, which require features such as dynamic zoom/pan and adjusting window/level settings. Accordingly, it may be advantageous to provide methods, apparatuses, computer program products, and systems that allow for remote viewing, managing, manipulating, sharing, and annotating data, such as images, using a general purpose viewing agent, such as a web browser, without requiring the download and installation of specialized software.